Tag Archives: American Freedom Law Center

The tides really have turned, ever since The Deplorables rose up and voted Donald Trump into the White House.

It’s Christmas again. Here’s the latest good news.

Remember that insufferable “clock boy”? — Ahmed Mohamed, who achieved notoriety a year ago when, as a 14-year-old freshman at an Irving, Texas, high school, he was arrested, briefly detained by police, and suspended for three days after bringing to school a clock that looked like a briefcase bomb.

Ahmed claimed to have “invented” the easily assembled clock, and that he had brought it to school to show it to his shop teacher. But the truth was that he deliberately tried to provoke a confrontation: The first teacher to whom he showed the clock told him to put it in his locker and not show it around. So Ahmed continued to show the bomb-like clock around until he found a teacher who reacted with the apparently desired response.

News of the arrest rapidly went viral, resulting in allegations of Ahmed being the victim of racial profiling and Islamophobia. The Left defended and heaped praises on Ahmed for being some sort of boy genius for inventing the clock, which, of course, was a lie because he didn’t invent anything. All Ahmed did was to take the innards of a Radio Shack digital clock and installed it in a cigar box. Obama even invited Ahmed to the White House.

Although Ahmed and his family had since moved to Qatar, accepting a scholarship offered to Ahmed by the Qatar Foundation, Ahmed’s father still sued the city of Irving and the school district for $15 million for inflicting “psychological trauma” and “permanently scarring” Ahmed’s (non-existent) “reputation in the global community”.

Thankfully, a district court judge sees Ahmed for the fraudster he is and threw out the lawsuit.

Debra Heine reports for PJMedia that after a nearly three-hour hearing on January 9, 2017, District Court Judge Maricela Mooredismissed a defamation lawsuit against the mayor of Irving, Fox News and others, filed by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, on his own behalf and on behalf of his 15-year-old son, Ahmed.

During the lengthy hearing, Judge Moore pressed Mohamed’s lawyer, Fort Worth attorney Susan Hutchison, to provide any facts that would suggest that the defendants had said anything false or defamatory about Mohamed or his son during television broadcasts. After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence.

The next day after the hearing, the court published Judge Moore’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit “with prejudice,” which means the judge has made a final determination on the merits of the case, and the plaintiff is therefore forbidden from filing another lawsuit based on the same grounds.

The motion to dismiss had been filed by lawyers from the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) and local counsel Pete Rowe on behalf of the Center for Security Policy (“CSP”) and Jim Hanson, two of the defendants in the defamation case, which also named as defendants the local Fox affiliate, Glenn Beck, and Beck’s production company.

AFLC co-founder and senior counsel David Yerushalmi explained to Judge Moore that the purpose of the lawsuit was to intimidate into silence those who might comment publicly on the connection between jihad, terrorism, sharia, and Islam.

Upon leaving the courtroom after the hearing, Yerushalmi made a statement that “This lawsuit filed by Clock Boy’s father is yet another example of Islamist lawfare, which is a component of the Muslim Brotherhood’s civilization jihad.” Yerushalmi explained that the purpose of such lawsuits, formally labelled Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP), is to intimidate into silence those who might comment publicly on the connection between jihad, terrorism, sharia, and Islam. Yerushalmi added:

“The Islamists employ the progressive mainstream media to label any public criticism of a sharia-centric, jihad-driven Islam as ‘Islamophobic,’ and they add fear and financial ruin to the equation by utilizing the legal system to file SLAPP actions.”

Now that the lawsuit has been dismissed, AFLC is petitioning the court for lawyer fees and sanctions against Clock Boy’s dad.